Workshop

The machines behind the projects and the blog posts.

A board's path through the line: paste, place, reflow, inspect.

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  paste

  Samsung SMP400 stencil printer

  Solder paste pulled across a laser cut stencil. Boards start here.

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  place

  Samsung SM321 pick & place

  The Samsung SM321 places parts from a trolley of feeders, from prototypes to 100 unit runs. More on the line →

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  reflow

  NeoDen IN8c reflow oven

  Paste melted evenly, panel after panel. The difference between a line you trust and a line you babysit. More on the arrival →

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  inspect

  Rexxam Sherlock 300 AOI

  Rescued from the scrap heap, its 20 year old software being replaced with Toby. More on the Toby project →

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  Agilent 8753ES network analyser

  30 kHz to 6 GHz of S-parameters, here sweeping a 915 MHz antenna on an HFS Design board. A serious step up from the NanoVNA that tuned the first Dengus units. More on antenna tuning →

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  Essemtec manual pick & place

  The newest addition: a manual pick and place, photographed on the trip home. For the jobs too small to justify setting up the big machine, like one offs and first prototypes.

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  Shapeoko 3XL & Nomad 3

  A Shapeoko 3XL router and a Nomad 3 mill, side by side. The Shapeoko does big flat parts and anything in wood; the Nomad does small precise parts and test fixtures for boards off the line.

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  Bambu Lab H2C

  FDM printing with AMS for enclosures and cases, including the one the BC-250 lives in.

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  Formlabs Form 2 resin printer

  Resin printing on the bench, for the parts where FDM layer lines won't do.

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  The desk

  Two screens in a dark corner, where the firmware and this site get written. There's usually a Micromelon Rover somewhere on it.

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  Homelab

  A three node Proxmox cluster, the main node on bonded dual 10GbE, with 46TB of NAS behind it and a 3000VA EATON rack UPS that shuts everything down cleanly when the power fails. Around thirty VMs and containers: self hosted Git and CI runners, network wide DNS, a photo library, an IoT platform, and the AMD BC-250 serving local AI models. The lot backs up to the NAS nightly. More on the BC-250 →